Essays Quotes - Page 2

• The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Writing, Different, Prisms

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• In high school, I won a prize for an essay on tuberculosis. When I got through writing the essay, I was sure I had the disease.

  Constance Baker Motley

  Writing, School, Tuberculosis

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• One would think that in writing about literary men and matters there would be no difficulty in finding a title for one's essay, or that any embarrassment which might arise would be from excess of material. I find this, however, far from being the case.

  James Payn

  Writing, Men, Thinking

  James Payn (1882). “Sammlung”

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• I'm older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that.

  Joan Collins

  Sister, Writing, School

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• I'm most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page sunrise over the desert and masses of a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.

  Anthony Hopkins

  Sunrise, Desert, Pages

  Interview with Helen Keier, www.ign.com. February 10, 2001.

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• I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

  Donna Tartt

  Writing, Literature, Admire

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• Doubt is my boon companion, the faithful St. Bernard ever at my side. Whether writing essays or just going about daily life, I am constantly second-guessing myself. My mind is filled with 'yes, buts,' 'so whats?' and other skeptical rejoinders. I am forever monitoring myself for traces of folly, insensitivity, arrogance, false humility, cruelty, stupidity, immaturity and, guess what, I keep finding examples. Age has not made me wiser, except maybe in retrospect.

  Phillip Lopate

  Humility, Writing, Forever

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• Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable

  Per Brinch Hansen

  Art, Writing, Crystals

  Per Brinch Hansen (1996). “The search for simplicity: essays in parallel programming”, IEEE

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• I am far from any intention to limit curiosity, or confine the labours of learning to arts of immediate and necessary use. It is only from the various essays of experimental industry, and the vague excursions of mind set upon discovery, that any advancement of knowledge can be expected; and though many must be disappointed in their labours, yet they are not to be charged with having spent their time in vain; their example contributed to inspire emulation, and their miscarriage taught others the way to success.

  Samuel Johnson

  Art, Miscarriage, Necessary Use

  Samuel Johnson (1889). “Select Essays”

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• Christopher Lynch has made the best and the first careful translation of Machiavelli's Art of War. With useful notes, an excellent introduction, an interpretive essay, glossary, and index, it is a treasure for readers of military history and Renaissance thought as well as for lovers of Machiavelli.

  Harvey Mansfield

  Art, Military, War

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• In a series of wonderful essays, Evan Handler gives himself up to us - warts and all. To our amusement and bemusement we share in his emotional growth as he struggles to mature. I not only laughed along with him but felt that I too had grown a little along the way. Who could ask for more?

  Lewis Black

  Struggle, Emotional, Giving

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• My English teacher, Dr. John Lindstrom, taught me an appreciation for the written word. Until his class, I'd dabbled in journalism and essay writing. But when he selected one of my essays as the best in the class, it gave me the confidence to see myself as a writer.

  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  Teacher, Appreciation, Writing

  Source: www.sbnation.com

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• Without the Utopians of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first City.....Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future.

  Anatole France

  Inspirational, Motivational, Dream

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• The modern essay has regained a good deal of its literary status in our time, much to the credit of Joseph Epstein.

  Karl Shapiro

  Credit, Modern, Deals

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• Life is not a multiple choice test, it's an open-book essay exam.

  Alan Blinder

  Book, Teaching, Multiple Choice

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• Plutarch has written an essay on the benefits which a man may receive from his enemies; and among the good fruits of enmity, mentions this in particular, that by the reproaches which it casts upon us, we see the worst side of ourselves.

  Joseph Addison

  Men, Enemy, May

  Joseph Addison (1839). “Essays, Moral and Humorous: Also Essays on Imagination and Taste”, p.109

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• Not so much a film as a visual essay, exquisitely directed and photographed (by Sacha Vierny)... Difficult to watch but well worthwhile for those willing to be challenged.

  Leonard Maltin

  Watches, Film, Worthwhile

  Leonard Maltin (1994). “Leonard Maltin's movie and video guide”, N A L Trade

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• One of my favorite writers is Michel de Montaigne. My wife gave me a beautiful 17th-century edition of Montaigne's essays translated by John Florio. That's probably my most precious possession.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Beautiful, Wife, Precious Possessions

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials.

  Stanley Kubrick

  Art, Thinking, Horror Genre

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• The Restless Anthropologist is a rich, powerful, and compulsively readable collection of essays by anthropologists who look back at the multiple relationships between their serial fieldwork experiences and their lives. Illustrating the dense interweaving of the personal and the professional that is the hallmark of anthropology as a vocation, these essays are at once affectively deep reflections, and clear-eyed assessments, of lives often lived 'between here and there.' Alma Gottlieb's idea to stimulate these articles and bring together this collection was inspired.

  Sherry Ortner

  Powerful, Reflection, Assessment

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• The last time I was asked that, I said "A Year Without Spoons." Normally you get asked the same questions over and over, so it feels boring to say the same thing. But then I was like, I don't even know another essay I like. They're all good.

  Chelsea Martin

  Boring, Last Time

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• For TV you also get those pre-interviews when researchers ask you what you're going to say. The pre-interview drives me insane. If they've already decided the outcome, why don't I just hand in an essay? Maybe if we talk we'll find something out. I'd rather just have an awkward pause.

  Jarvis Cocker

  Hands, Awkward, Insane

  "Jarvis Cocker: the iceman cometh". Interview with Lucy Siegle, www.theguardian.com. June 2, 2012.

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• I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

  George Eliot

  Writing, Poet, Pardon

  George Eliot (2015). “Middlemarch”, p.108, Booklassic

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• The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make to them; a man may live long, yet get little from life. Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will - Montaigne, Essays

  Barbara Taylor Bradford

  Life, Lying, Men

  FaceBook post by Barbara Taylor Bradford from Sep 20, 2013

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• Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Philosophy, Book, Eye

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